Webby thoughts, most about around interesting applications of ecmascript in relation to other open web standards. I live in Mountain View, California, and spend some of my spare time co-maintaining Greasemonkey together with Anthony Lieuallen.

2007-08-22

Javascript getters and setters may be one of the most useful upcoming language features today (already working in some browsers, including Firefox), but google the feature and you will be swamped with articles and posts, not on how to put them to good use, but how to defend against malicious use of them for web pages tripping (Firefox / ditto extension) security holes. It's really just John Resig that stands out of the crowd, showing how it is done, suggesting good uses, and teaching the stuff.

Getters and setters are a Javascript 1.6 (IIRC) language feature that lets you provide interfaces that look and feel like DOM 0 interfaces, where you read and set a variable or property like document.title or document.links, and receive something that may or may not require computation, compositing and much else behind the scenes. The only news is that you can now implement things like the location object (set href and affect all the other properties in one go) from mere javascript and that the syntax is even rather friendly, by javascript standards:

- which will yield you an object with an href and a protocol property you can tweak, just like any other, and see changes reflect to the other property, what you see if you alert(myLoc), and so on. It's a dream for making APIs that don't feel like java pushed down your throat with a ten-foot pole.

I've been meaning to add some features to Greasemonkey to grant it proper introspection (as all great software systems are introspective), for the Greasemonkey header block, and once I thought twice about it, for the source code at large. Something like a self object, with a "source" property for the code and a headers property for the parsed headers -- so self.headers.include would be the array of all @include headers, and so on.

I wanted that feature to give anybody the option to make their own cool extensions and libraries to Greasemonkey, making use of structured information -- much like an @xpath feature I've been noodling on on and off over the past few months to make GM scripts much more maintainable (and quick to write, and, optionally, self deprecating).

Anyway, the natural way of implementing this is via getters, and I was just about done when I hit a wall with Mozilla's extension API which wouldn't let the script executing in the Greasemonkey sandbox read my exposed getter variable (at the time named GM_headers): it threw a "Permission denied to get property Sandbox.GM_headers" exception when code accessed GM_headers, and that was that. Is this feature crippled for extensions wanting to provide getter / setter APIs from javascript code, or do I miss some incantations to bless the sandboxed code to read that?

The (hopefully) full picture of relevant details, surrounding my implementation:

This misfeature is also what stopped us from getting a responseXML property on the GM_xmlhttpRequest response object, earlier this spring. Any Mozilla hackers out there with solutions, knowledge or even just input on this? Your help and insights on this would be most valued.

Javascript getters and setters may be one of the most useful upcoming language features today (already working in some browsers, including Firefox), but google the feature and you will be swamped with articles and posts, not on how to put them to good use, but how to defend against malicious use of them for web pages tripping (Firefox / ditto extension) security holes. It's really just John Resig that stands out of the crowd, showing how it is done, suggesting good uses, and teaching the stuff.

Getters and setters are a Javascript 1.6 (IIRC) language feature that lets you provide interfaces that look and feel like DOM 0 interfaces, where you read and set a variable or property like document.title or document.links, and receive something that may or may not require computation, compositing and much else behind the scenes. The only news is that you can now implement things like the location object (set href and affect all the other properties in one go) from mere javascript and that the syntax is even rather friendly, by javascript standards:

- which will yield you an object with an href and a protocol property you can tweak, just like any other, and see changes reflect to the other property, what you see if you alert(myLoc), and so on. It's a dream for making APIs that don't feel like java pushed down your throat with a ten-foot pole.

I've been meaning to add some features to Greasemonkey to grant it proper introspection (as all great software systems are introspective), for the Greasemonkey header block, and once I thought twice about it, for the source code at large. Something like a self object, with a "source" property for the code and a headers property for the parsed headers -- so self.headers.include would be the array of all @include headers, and so on.

I wanted that feature to give anybody the option to make their own cool extensions and libraries to Greasemonkey, making use of structured information -- much like an @xpath feature I've been noodling on on and off over the past few months to make GM scripts much more maintainable (and quick to write, and, optionally, self deprecating).

Anyway, the natural way of implementing this is via getters, and I was just about done when I hit a wall with Mozilla's extension API which wouldn't let the script executing in the Greasemonkey sandbox read my exposed getter variable (at the time named GM_headers): it threw a "Permission denied to get property Sandbox.GM_headers" exception when code accessed GM_headers, and that was that. Is this feature crippled for extensions wanting to provide getter / setter APIs from javascript code, or do I miss some incantations to bless the sandboxed code to read that?

The (hopefully) full picture of relevant details, surrounding my implementation:

This misfeature is also what stopped us from getting a responseXML property on the GM_xmlhttpRequest response object, earlier this spring. Any Mozilla hackers out there with solutions, knowledge or even just input on this? Your help and insights on this would be most valued.